Heightmap Level Generator vs SimpleXTerrain

Heightmap Level Generator creates procedural terrain and heightmaps in a browser for Unreal Engine, Unity and Godot. Its GPU-based generation uses WebGPU compute shaders and WGSL. Outputs include 16-bit heightmaps with features such as cliffs, hills, mountains, erosion, rivers, lakes and a raised border ring. It can also generate connected roads, towns, map exits, road grades and embankments around water, with temperate, steppe, desert and snow world biomes. Users can adjust settings live, compare 12 seeds, preview a 2D map and 3D mesh, and walk through terrain in first person. Exports include engine-specific terrain formats, Web or three.js formats, heightmaps, splatmaps, masks, water levels, color maps, layout JSON, glTF meshes and metadata JSON. Road, town and water masks and layout data can support PCG, Houdini and custom placement scripts. The free project supports share links, presets, JSON save and load, and undo and redo. Online use requires a WebGPU-capable browser; local use requires Node.js and such a browser.

SimpleXTerrain is a free, MIT-licensed addon for procedural terrain generation in Godot 4 .NET using C#. Its node graph editor defines heightmaps, biomes, splatmaps, and scattered instances. Heightmap sources include Perlin, fractal, and Voronoi noise, radial shapes, splines, and images. Modifiers include levels, curves, slope masks, hydraulic and thermal erosion, terraces, beaches, ledges, and blur.

At runtime, the addon evaluates terrain chunks asynchronously on .NET background tasks around a moving camera, then streams heightmaps and control maps into Terrain3D regions. The documented workflow uses a Terrain3D node with a camera or character attached to a terrain streamer to build Godot scenes. Requirements are Godot Engine 4.6 or later in its .NET or Mono edition, .NET SDK 8.0 or later, and the Terrain3D plugin. Setup involves copying the addon into the project’s addons directory, rebuilding the C# solution, and enabling the plugin in Project Settings. Foliage and object scattering can generate placement data, but the feature is experimental. Some GPU-capable work has RenderingDevice compute helpers; the documentation identifies CPU evaluation as the reliable path.